Annabel Lee
by Miss-Smilla
Summary: ‘things don't die or remain damaged / but return: stumps grow back hands, / a head reconnects to a neck, / a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.’ - ‘In Childhood’, Kimiko Hahn


Title: Annabel Lee  
Character/Pairing: 10/Rose  
Rating: M  
Summary: 'It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived…'  
Disclaimer: Not for profit, but for fun, these are not mine.  
Author's Notes: Dark. With a little disturbing imagery that insidiously snuck-in. Sneaky. I think I need to go away and cheer up.

* * *

Annabel Lee

* * *

'things don't die or remain damaged / but return: stumps grow back hands, / a head reconnects to a neck, / a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.' - 'In Childhood', Kimiko Hahn.

* * *

The seabed is bone dry. His skin hurts, tight and desiccated. Leather wings spiral, creaking with heat over their heads. And she says that word. And he's looking at the shape her mouth makes so intently that he almost never hears what she has said.

And his smile is late, slowly stretching the skin across his skull.

* * *

When she'd clench around him, so tight and wet, she'd groan. And she would arch, pressing every inch of him into her, her skin burning.

A flush, furiously red, blooming across her flesh and scalding him.

He ached for that moment, when she'd fall apart beneath him, gasping. His skin was cold, where she wasn't burning him and he'd soak in her sweat. He'd flutter inside her, and she'd sink, boneless, beneath him, hip bones still pushing against his, thighs loosening and shuddering slowly open. Her eyes were half-closed, and as she relaxed, her blush would mottle itself back to pink skin.

She cooled herself against him, pressing her over-heated flesh against his coldness.

So hot. Too hot, she'd feverishly whisper, pushing every inch of him into her, arms wrapped around him so very tightly.

But she'd never hold him as tightly as he held onto her.

* * *

He wonders, in the third week of her absence, if he's holding on too tightly.

Ruined, she said once, in the quiet dark, intimacy with anyone else. She demanded his cold flesh, only his. He's had a lot of time to consider it without her next to him. He didn't think of her as a king's mistress burned against his lips. He didn't.

He wonders if he's a liar.

He walks for a long time after Donna leaves. He walks the same patterns.

And the extra cup of tea he leaves for her is always drunk.

She flits in his peripheral vision every time he passes her door. It is always slightly ajar, and her blonde hair is being combed, or she is daubing that thick mascara on with her mouth slightly open.

He makes two teas every day for a month.

* * *

One day the sky is full of Zeppelins.

His skin is tight and dry, and his mouth is full of salt, and he is shaking, shaking.

Something hot is pulling him, wrenching his insides, beneath his breastbone. He's sure she never had this hold on him. A month after she left he stopped making two cups of tea.

He wonders if he's a liar.

Of course he looks.

He knows that she was.

He can't stop the shaking beneath his skin when he looks at the date. One day of Zeppelins with many, many preceding. He itches beneath his flesh, anger in his bones, he is towering above the store clerk before he knows what he is doing, and the news bulletin is in his fist.

The clerk turns once to look at his face and backs away frantically, holding up his hands until the Doctor stops advancing and tries to relax the muscles in his face.

He begins to wonder who was lying to whom, when the sky was hot, and when her flesh was flaming.

* * *

He wonders if she'd left tea in her room.

He hasn't cleaned it out. Yet.

There's a scent, every time he walks past it, cloying. Decay with syrup tangled in it, just this side of life.

And when he walks past, there's movement in the corners.

* * *

It takes a week.

She comes to him one night, and he can hardly see her skin for all the dust.

Cold, she says, I'm so cold. So he holds her to him, desperately, his hands against her as he tries to warm her. Holding her, the feel of bones shifting beneath her flesh.

And her skin flakes wetly away beneath his palms as she leans up, lips soft against his ear, breath full of rot, and she says the word again.

It is all he can hear when he wakes.

* * *

It's her voice, this time, which calls him back. That word.

A little late, standing on the beach, and he can feel the sand, soft beneath him.

He can turn his ankles, so that he is standing on the outside edges of his trainers, instep pointing to the sky, and his whole body weight rests on this sliver. It is heavy, pushing him deeper into the bay, and his muscles are burning between his shoulder blades, and the weight of all his bones feels like it will pull him apart.

He lies down in the wet sand, cold, soaking through him, seeping through his suit.

And against his fingers, the dry flake of her skin, the feel of her hipbone, sharp against his palm. A sigh, a little wet retch, as she rises out of the sand to lie next to him.

And he turns into the shape of her body, tangles himself up in her, not caring that her hair comes away in his hands and her smile is stretched across her skull.

* * *

He presses her to him one night, her skin spiced with the scent of firework gunpowder and edible ball-bearings. And she shivers against him, her spine curving against his chest.

And she scrunches the blanket in her fists, shrugs it into the hollow between her neck and shoulder. Legs stretching and curling against his. Cold, she whispers, I'm cold.

And he doesn't know whether to hold her to him, or to push her away.

* * *

Fin.


End file.
